07 | September | 2010 | Frontier Markets

A relatively recent WSJ piece in June touted the virtues of acquiring and renting out farmland, an idea also touched upon in a Fortune article last summer:

“Land is scarce and will become scarcer as the world has to double food output to satisfy increased demand by 2050,” says Joachim von Braun, director general at the International Food Policy Research Institute. “With limited land and water resources, this will automatically lead to increased valuations of productive land. And it goes hand in hand with water. Water scarcity will probably increase even more than land.”

Improving diets in the developing world will also help drive up prices. As per capita incomes rise in China, India, and other parts of Asia, hundreds of millions of people will be adding meat to their daily fare. In the coming decades that will have a multiplier effect on demand because of the massive amounts of grain used to feed livestock. The USDA estimates that it takes seven pounds of grain to produce one pound of beef. Even with better crop yields from new seed technology, a supply crunch is looming. And the effects of climate change – rising sea levels, more droughts – could only amplify the problem.

“I’m convinced that farmland is going to be one of the best investments of our time,” says commodities guru Jim Rogers, who serves as an adviser to AgCapita. “Eventually, of course, food prices will get high enough that the market probably will be flooded with supply through development of new land or technology or both, and the bull market will end. But that’s a long ways away yet.”

While the best pure plays on farmland are still controlled by fund managers and private equity, there may be an increasing scattering of other ways for retail investors to gain some exposure. Shonda Warner’s farmland-only real estate investment trust in the U.S. could be an idea that catches on, for example; but in the meantime, Buenos Aires-based ADR Cresud, Inc. has long been a personal favorite.